By now you all know that I don’t like Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but one of the things that most annoyed me about the film was the way that, after spending two thirds of its running time doing something totally different from (and less interesting than, in my opinion) John Carpenter’s original, it suddenly turned into a stalk and slash carbon copy. I was never going to have really liked Rob Zombie’s movie, but I would have respected it more if it had indulged in the courage of its own weird, bad convictions.
Maybe that’s what he’s doing this time. Zombie tells IGN: This movie is 100 percent whatever I want to do. And we never discussed Halloween or Michael Myers or anything. In fact, every time we do something we go, ‘This doesn’t seem [like Halloween].’ We can do whatever we want and it’s very freeing. And I think it’s making for a much better movie because we’re not trying to do what anyone is expecting at all. In fact, we’re trying to do the exact opposite at all times — exactly what people aren’t expecting. You figure with a character like this, this time I really wanted to reinvent him.
Of course, 100 percent whatever he wants to do sounds awful. According to IGN’s set visit, Myers is walking around in a furry vest they compare to the one the Monster wore in Son of Frankenstein. And it seems that visions of his dead mother and himself as a kid in the clown costume are actually haunting Michael, showing up in scenes where’s he chasing Laurie Strode. That’s heavy handed badness – you don’t have to show a guy’s mom hovering over him to get across the idea that he’s haunted by her.
But again, bad as it sounds – and this and all the rest I’ve heard about this film on and off the record make it sound like it’s going to be a really terrible movie – at least this time it’s all Rob’s badness. I may actually find something to enjoy about that.
Thanks to Phil for the link.